A Single Sediment-Microbial Fuel Cell Powering a Wireless Telecommunication System

The authors report the ability of a single sediment-Microbial Fuel Cell (MFC) to power Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) nodes. Such a system is able to collect information from sensors and to transmit it to sinks. In particular, the PowWow platform presented here is combining an open and modular hardware design with an open-source software with a very light memory footprint and relying on event-driven programming. It includes energy harvesting capabilities and is able to adapt its radio data transmission behavior to the available energy supplied by the sediment-MFC.